Awan: Our growth has been a journey of constant learning, but if I were to pinpoint the principles our growth team lives by today, which I hope would help others building and growing products, they would be:
Define one "North Star" metric for success that is aligned with how your users get value as well as with the success of your business, then measure everything and how it contributes to the North Star metric. Good examples of true-north metrics for growth are measures like how many users are truly engaged with your product
Growth is a team sport so hire wisely and invest in your team
Good product, measured by long-term retention, comes first; growth comes second
Invest in multiple growth channels and identify potential channels by looking at existing user behavior, especially how they are currently discovering your product. At LinkedIn, our biggest channels are viral growth, search-engine optimization of profiles and other member-generated content and partnerships.
Understand that growth requires continuous prioritization and feedback so always be testing

Awan: Our growth has been a journey of constant learning, but if I were to pinpoint the principles our growth team lives by today, which I hope would help others building and growing products, they would be:
Define one "North Star" metric for success that is aligned with how your users get value as well as with the success of your business, then measure everything and how it contributes to the North Star metric. Good examples of true-north metrics for growth are measures like how many users are truly engaged with your product
Growth is a team sport so hire wisely and invest in your team
Good product, measured by long-term retention, comes first; growth comes second
Invest in multiple growth channels and identify potential channels by looking at existing user behavior, especially how they are currently discovering your product. At LinkedIn, our biggest channels are viral growth, search-engine optimization of profiles and other member-generated content and partnerships.
Understand that growth requires continuous prioritization and feedback so always be testing

Awan: Here’s some advice to others as they focus on growing their own company:
Make sure you have product-market fit before you invest in growth. What that means is you have validated that your product is in a market with large demand and your product is satisfying the need for users who try the product. You can measure this by retention rate which is essentially the percentage of your users who keep coming back. If your retention is not stable, you’d want to improve the product first rather than wasting resources on growth.
Prioritize growth from the very beginning and build it right into the product. It’s much better for your users to bring other users to the product as they create and share photos or other content or, invite others in the course of normally using the app than to try growing through marketing that feels bolted onto the product. This is critically important if your product has network effects because the product value is limited for early users if the network doesn’t grow fast enough.
As your company starts to scale, it’s important to create a dedicated multi-disciplinary growth team covering product, design, marketing, engineering, data science, and business operations. In a startup, a single person may be playing multiple of those roles (an engineer who’s also the data scientist) but as you scale, you can create dedicated functional roles.

Instead, we define the goal of the growth team as accelerating the realization of LinkedIn’s vision, which is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Keeping this vision top of mind led us to set the right growth objectives and priorities.

With over 65% contribution to the total revenue, talent solutions are the most important services and tools included in the LinkedIn business model. Talent solutions include premium recruiting tools for the companies and recruiters to help them find the most suitable employees/partners for their business.

LinkedIn apart from being the best recruitment platform is also a sought-after social networking website by marketers to execute their marketing campaigns. This service contributes to over 18% of the total revenue of the company and offers features which let companies to not only create a company page but also enhance their marketing efforts by creating sponsored content, sponsored InMails and text advertisements.

In the below example from LinkedIn, combining a wizard form with a progress bar is a great tactic for improving the pace of the experience. The long process of creating a professional profile is divided into 4 manageable steps

I don't think it's a good idea to take #linkedin as an example of any good #ux